Quotes About Judgment

I ain't never done nothin' that wasn't part sin, said John, and he looked at the long wrapped body. p. 241

You got to be awful rich to dress as bad as you do," he said.

Its inhabitants are, as the man once said, "whores, pimps, gamblers, and sons of bitches," by which he meant Everybody. Had the man looked through another peephole he might have said, "Saints and angels and martyrs and holy men," and he would have meant the same thing.

I will call no being good who is not what I mean when I apply that epithet to my fellow creatures; and if such a creature can sentence me to hell for not so calling him, to hell I will go .

The human faculties of perception, judgment, discriminative feeling, mental activity, and even moral preference, are exercised only in making a choice. He who does anything because it is the custom, makes no choice.

He looked at me like I was stupid. Why do people always look at me like that?

Critics are like pigs at the pastry cart.

Part of being human is being on the verge of disgrace.

Right and wrong aren't dropped from the sky. We. We make them. Against misery. Invariably, Harry, invariably--he grows confident of his ability to negotiate long words--misery follows their disobedience. Not our own, often at first not our own.

Dollars had once gathered like autumn leaves on the wooden collection plates; dollars were the flourishing sign of God's specifically American favor, made manifest in the uncountable millions of Carnegie and Mellon and Henry Ford and Catholina Lambert. But amid this fabled plenty the whiff of damnation had cleared of dollars and cents the parched ground around Clarence Wilmot.

This got him to the door. There, ridiculously, he turned. It was only at the door, he decided in retrospect, that her conduct was quite in excusable: not only did she stand unncessarily close, but, by shifting the weight of her body to one leg and leaning her head sidewise, she lowered her height several inches, placing him in a dominating position exactly suited to the broad, passive shadows she must have known were on her face. ("Snowing in Greenwich Village)

Our brains are no longer conditioned for reverence and awe. We cannot imagine a Second Coming that would not be cut down to size by the televised evening news, or a Last Judgment not subject to pages of holier-than-Thou second-guessing in The New York Review of Books.

Tall as he is, there is no carrying the slope under his shirt as anything other than a loose gut, a paunch that in itself must weigh as much as a starving Ethiopian child.

I think... no, I am positive... that you are the most unattractive man I have ever met in my entire life. You know, in the short time we've been together, you have demonstrated EVERY loathsome characteristic of the male personality and even discovered a few new ones. You are physically repulsive, intellectually retarded, you're morally reprehensible, vulgar, insensitive, selfish, stupid, you have no taste, a lousy sense of humor and you smell. You're not even interesting enough to make me sick.

I'd rather have a daughter in a whorehouse than a son in the police force,' Esther used to rage to anyone who would listen.

Aren't maids the ultimate art critics?

Read to make yourself smarter! Less judgmental. More apt to understand your friends' insane behavior, or better yet, your own.

It's always up to other people to say if something is art. I hate it when people say, I'm an artist. I think, well, I'll be the judge of that. And I don't think artist is a job description. It's a critique, a favorable critique, that someone else might apply to your work.

You should never read just for enjoyment. Read to make yourself smarter! Less judgmental. More apt to understand your friends' insane behavior, or better yet, your own.

You should never read just for 'enjoyment.' Read to make yourself smarter! Less judgmental. More apt to understand your friends' insane behavior, or better yet, your own. Pick 'hard books.' Ones you have to concentrate on while reading. And for God's sake, don't let me ever hear you say, 'I can't read fiction. I only have time for the truth.' Fiction is the truth, fool!

it seems to me that the moralist is the most useless and contemptible of creatures. He is useless in that he would expend his energies upon making judgments rather than upon gaining knowledge, for the reason that judgment is easy and knowledge is difficult. He is contemptible in that his judgments reflect a vision of himself which in his ignorance and pride he would impose upon the world. I implore you, do not become a moralist; you will destroy your art and your mind.

Nothing suits worse with vice than want of sense

They stick you with those names, those labels -- 'rebel' or whatever; whatever they like to use. Because they need a label; they need a name. They need something to put the price tag on the back of.

Gentlemen reformers, beware of this common practice of yours! beware of calling an act evil on Tuesday because that same act was evil on Monday!